Bush and his buddies and they all fell down

US President George W Bush will spend his last year in the White House without his best friends who backed his defiant 2003 invasion of Iraq.

US President George W Bush will spend his last year in the White House without his best friends who backed his defiant 2003 invasion of Iraq. Britain's Tony Blair and Australia's John Howard have been shunted out into political wilderness. Blair handed over power to his long-standing deputy Gordon Brown and voters squarely rejected Howard in his bid to remain prime minister.

Bush Junior's presidency will be remembered as much for his misadventure in Iraq as his father's was for defeating Saddam Hussein. Already, British troops have pulled out of Basra and new Australian PM Kevin Rudd has decided to withdraw his troops from the warravaged country too. Rudd, in fact, hit Bush harder. In his first major policy announcement, he said Australia would ratify the Kyoto protocol - isolating Bush further on climate change policies.

But the unkindest cut for Bush in 2007 did not come from abroad. It came from within his intelligence establishment, which said it had high confidence that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons' programme back in 2003.

The bold intelligence estimate has probably ensured that there will be no military invasion of Iran. The end result would have been the same: as in the case of Iraq no nuclear weapons would have been found. US intelligence has pre-empted its President.